Days after taking over as China’s leader in 2012, Xi Jinping led other top Communist Party officials to Beijing’s National Museum to visit an exhibit on party history entitled “The Road to Rejuvenation”. On Tuesday, less than a week after being anointed for a second term as party chief at a twice-a-decade party congress, Xi and the other men at the pinnacle of the party made a rare joint visit to China’s financial capital, Shanghai, where they paid homage to the party’s birthplace and founding fathers. Official photos showed the men at the site of the first party congress in 1921, gazing solemnly at a relief sculpture of the party’s original leaders and standing around a wooden meeting table. “This is an important symbolic gesture,” said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Xi is not the first general secretary of the party to try to send a message with a well-publicised trip early in his tenure.

Source: Egypt Independent October 31, 2017 10:18 UTC